…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

The Best Ways To Create Online Tests

Before I share the links to test-creating sites here, I should also point out that there are also several excellent sites that let you create online learning games. These can also function as effective ways to assess understanding — by either having teachers or students create them (I have a strong preference towards the latter both in making games and tests). You can check-out The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games to learn my picks for that category.

I’m not listing these test-creation sites in any order of preference. They each offer very distinct features that could work in different situations. By the way, they’re all free.

So here are my picks for The Best Ways To Create Online Tests:

Here are two sites that are connected — SMILE and CLEAR. They’re both from Michigan State University, and allow teachers (and students) to easily create clozes, drag-and-drop exercises, and sequencing activities. They also allow you to use audio and video with the activities, and will host them as well. This is an excellent site for making a variety of ESL/EFL-related assessments.

Classmarker is a good to go to just create basic online tests. It’s simple, efficient and effective.

Just in case you want to make a number of different tests to just print out on paper — without the ability for students to take the test online — Easy Testmaker is the place to go.

Testmoz is an app that lets you create an online, self-correcting quiz without having to register.

FunnelBrain is primarily know as a site where you can create flashcards. It does an okay job at it, but I don’t think it warrants being on The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards list. However, they just added a tool that allows you to create online tests. It’s not flashy, and doesn’t have as many features as some other sites on this list, but it’s ease of use made me decide to add it to this post.

educaplay looks like a great free (as far as I can tell, at least) tool where you can easily create a ton of different kinds of educational interactives that you can link to or embed in your site. These include:

For at least some of the them, including dictation, it provides the ability to record audio.

gnowledge is a new site that lets teachers create tests, and tracks students taking them.

Quizpoo lets you create, without requiring registration, “this or that” quizzes. I had never actually heard of that “genre” of tests before, but you can see plenty of examples on their site. I could see students having a lot of fun making these kinds of tests. For example, as we study Latin America in my ELL Geography class, they could make one on “Mexico or Brazil” with the first “question” being “Brasilia” and the answer choices being “Mexico” or “Brazil.” The following “questions” could include “Pele” and “Baja California.” Students in my English class could make grammar ones like “Plural or Singular,” etc.

Image Quiz lets you easily grab images off the web (or upload your own) and create quizzes with them. No registration is required to create or take them, and there are quite a few already there.

Thanks to Lisa Johnson, I recently learned about Quizdini. It’s a simple and free tool for creating multiple-choice or “drag-and-drop” quizzes. There is no way right now to monitor student results, but they are working developing such a system.

Riddle looks like an exceptional site that you can use for creating a survey or a quiz.

I learned about Quizalize from David Kapuler. It seems like a simple and useful tool for creating an online quiz, though it also seems like a clone of Kahoot. Unfortunately, it also has Kahoot’s big drawback — when students are taking the quiz, though teachers can see the results, students cannot see how they are “ranking” compared to their classmates, which eliminates one of the best potential game features. Fortunately, Quizziz does have that element which, obviously, has to be used with care so that students facing more challenges don’t feel bad if they are not “winners.” I usually handle that by pairing students up. But I’m still adding Quizalize to this list because you never know what sites will be blocked by District filters and it’s always helpful to have options. (NOTE: They’ve made changes – see Online Learning Game Site Quizalize Adds New Feature I Like A LOT)

This is great stuff! User generated content is the way to go and I’ll be busy the next few days making sure I win this contest!!!! Wait and see! thanks Sue too. I’ll make sure to highlight for EFL Classroom 2.0 members! This is an idea par excellence!

Larry: Thank you for the mention of ProProfs Quiz School. Had a small request: ProProfs has a few sections. To ensure your readers reach the quiz or flashcards section that you refer, could you please consider changing the link to point directly to Quiz Section rather than home page.

Larry- thanks so much for the list- and continued resources- I particularly like the assessment tools that provide a multimedia function- especially when teaching multimedia forms is so prevalent! I am teaching pre service students this year- assessment strategies and tools is a focus, especially as it pertains to differentiating instruction and ESL, so this list of tools will assist greatly. Unfortunately, to help students succeed in our standardized testing- we still need to practice delivering the old fashion, paper and pencil tests too. My students, particularly the ELL students enjoyed my google doc tests, especially because I allowed some collaboration- however, I found them hard to format for printing (parents wanted
copies). Have a great day!

Many at my school are using Socrative with iPod Touches. It’s very user friendly, and our students love it. My only complaint is that it doesn’t allow teachers to share their tests (or maybe I haven’t figured it out yet.)

Thanks a ton for this list; will try couple of them. However, I need your suggestion on an online survey tool called SoGoSurvey. I was looking for some tools that help you conduct online tests and I came across SoGoSurvey and few more. I thought of opting for this tool as it’s budget friendly. What’s your opinion?

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My book, "The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels," (co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski) was published in the Summer of 2012